WATCH: VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger Talks Security, Dell and Cloud

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger believes the security industry has failed customers and offered ideas on how to change that during the 2018 Best of Breed Conference in Philadelphia. A huge issue in the cybersecurity landscape is customers implementing hundreds of different vendor security products, causing confusion and difficulties when problems arise, Gelsinger said. To simplify the market, VMware has been implementing security capabilities inside its products.

Gelsinger also discussed VMware’s interaction with other tech companies in the face of a strong relationship with Dell, which he called “very powerful” and growing rapidly. “It’s more critical for us to lean into those other relationships,” he said, pointing to companies like HP and Lenovo. “Clearly Dell has grown more rapidly, but we continue to see good performance from the HP Synergy partnership where we integrated our HCI stack with Synergy as a unique value-add. We announced Workspace One being integrated as the management plane for HPI’s client platform. We’ve seen unique good announcements from each of them.”

He also discussed his vision for a hybrid, multi-cloud future. The latest research from McKinsey shows that enterprise customers are using eight clouds on average, he said. “Our view is that the right answer is a hybrid answer,” said Gelsinger. “We view the economic model of a hybrid cloud, the resilience, the governance of it to be far better than either public or private. We want to enable customers to move past the public versus private and to public and private.”